Mahomet eBook

The revelation ends with a repetition of the restrictions
imposed upon women and an injunction to the Muslim
not to enter each other’s houses until they
have asked leave. This was a necessary ordinance
in that primitive community, where bolts were little
used and there was virtually no privacy, and was designed,
in common with most of his present utterances, to
encourage the leading of decent, well-regulated lives
by the followers of so magnificent a faith. Ayesha’s
defamers were publicly scourged, and the matter dismissed
from the Muslim mind, save that regulations had once
more been framed upon personal feelings and specific
events, and were to constitute the whole future law
regarding an important and difficult question.

Mahomet was justly content with the position of affairs
after the dispersion of the Beni Mustalik. He
had shown his strength to the surrounding desert tribes;
by systematically crushing each rebellion as it arose,
he had demonstrated to them the impossibility of alliance
against him. He knew they were each prone to self-seeking
and distrustful of each other, and he played unhesitatingly
upon their jealousies and passions. Thus he kept
them disunited and fearful, afraid even to ally with
his powerful enemy the Kureisch. For after all,
the Meccans were his chief obstacle; their opposition
was spirited and urged on by the memory of past humiliations
and triumphs. They alone were really worthy of
his steel, and he knew that, as far as the intermediary
wars were concerned, they were but the prelude to
another encounter in the year-long warfare with his
native city.

The drama closes in now upon the protagonists; save
for the expulsion of the last Jewish tribe in the
neighbourhood of Medina, there is little to compare
with that central causal hatred. The final hour
was not yet, but the struggle grew in intensity with
the passage of time—­the struggle wherein
one fought for revenge and future freedom from molestation,
but the other for the establishment of a faith in
its rightful environment, the manifestation before
men of that Faith’s determined achievement, the
symbol of its destined conquests and divinely appointed
power.

CHAPTER XV

THE WAR OF THE DITCH

“And God drove back the Infidels
in their wrath; they won no
advantage; God sufficed the Faithful in
the fight, for God is strong,
mighty.”—­The Kuran.

The Kureischite plans for the annihilation of Mahomet
were now complete. They had achieved an alliance
against him not only among the Bedouin tribes of the
interior, but also among the exiled and bitterly vengeful
Medinan Jews. Now in Schawwal, 627, Mahomet’s
unresting foes summoned all their confederates to
warfare “against this man.” The allied
tribes, chief among whom were the Beni Suleim and
Ghatafan, always at feud with Mahomet, hastened to
mass themselves at Mecca, where they were welcomed
confidently by the Kureiseh.